Question: Do you have any signs that may indicate your getting close to finding a well working and effective solution to killing cancer cells?

Alexis Barr answered on 18 Jun 2013:

We do. We have quite a few drugs now that can kill cancer cells growing in a petri dish very well. The big step is then to test these drugs in mouse models of cancer. If they work in mouse then it’s a good sign they might work in humans. So then we take promising drugs to clinical trials – in patients. The hardest thing is matching the drug to the patient. Not all drugs work in all patients. What we are starting do in my workplace is to sequence the genes of cancer patients to see which ones are mutated, then we can try and pick the best drug for that patient.